


percy weasley, or: the art of living when your life has just fallen apart

by neville



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Post-Battle of Hogwarts, Recovery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-05
Updated: 2017-12-05
Packaged: 2019-02-10 22:23:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,649
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12921444
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/neville/pseuds/neville
Summary: Sirius can't face Grimmauld Place, and moves in to the Burrow, where he finds a home in Percy Weasley's room.





	percy weasley, or: the art of living when your life has just fallen apart

Twelve Grimmauld Place is a fucking shithole, so Sirius stays instead at The Burrow: there are no more Potters to turn to, but the Weasleys are similarly kind-mannered, and within a matter of days he’s moved into Percy’s room, taking up a duvet on the floor.

Percy’s room is terrifyingly immaculate, as if it’s never belonged to someone with a childhood: it’s made mostly up of various bookcases, dusted and kept in alphabetical order of author surname like a library, and even his wardrobe is simply a collection of identical pressed shirts of varying inoffensive colours and perfectly-hung smart trousers, his Weasley jumpers folded up and in neat piles in baskets at the bottom. Sirius has never known Percy, but his room is intimidating; he’s sharing with a neat freak, someone who appears to have about as much personality as the clean slate of table that makes up his desk, furnished with a neat pile of seventh year textbooks, a quill, and some folded-up letters from the Ministry.

“Where is he?” Sirius asks when he goes to fetch himself a cup of tea; the kitchen is busy, because it’s one in the afternoon and everyone is clamouring for something to eat, and it’s almost a pick and mix of who to ask.

“Trekking around the forests with Charlie,” Ginny replies, taking the helm of the question. “They’ll be back soon, I’m sure. Percy’ll complain that the trees are ruining his trousers, or something like that.” She passes a sugar cube to Sirius, who watches it dissolve in the warmth of his Earl Grey; he takes it back upstairs, and almost feels bad about staining the table.

But it gives it personality.

Percy returns late afternoon, and he’s not what Sirius was expecting at all. His ironed clothes aren’t so ironed on him, rumpled like he’s been wearing them a few days too many, and his hair has grown out of its neat cut and is on its way to becoming a mullet of curls; he walks strangely, like he’s forgotten how to put one foot in front of the other without conscious thought, and his eyes are glazed over, unresponsive to the new mess that Sirius has added to his room. He almost misses Sirius at all on his way to sit down at his desk, only noticing because the chair is already occupied.

Percy looks at him. “No-one told me you were here.”

Sirius sets down his mug. It feels like a declaration. “Well, I am.” 

Percy says nothing, and simply takes a seat on the end of his bed. He looks as if he’s never had spirit; Sirius knows the feeling.

* * *

Sirius runs out of tears to cry on the day of Fred’s funeral; Remus’s is that same morning, a small service that seems to pass by like a whisper in the wind, and he finds himself leaving Fred’s early. He can’t watch them all cry because he thinks that’s just too much in one day, and takes a stubborn seat on someone’s memorial bench, lighting a cigarette with a bright yellow Muggle lighter. He has a bar of chocolate tucked in his pocket, and yet somehow, it feels inappropriate.

He says nothing when Percy takes a seat next to him, eyes red as the prick of blood and his cheeks stained with floods of tears, his breath still hitching when he reaches for more. Percy says little to him, seeming to exist in his own bubble of thought, so of all people, Sirius is surprised that it’s him Percy is here with. He has a family, and friends, and Sirius falls into neither of those categories, just a fringe figure on the edge of Percy’s life.

Sirius holds out the bar of chocolate; Percy stares blankly.

“It’s not gonna lift all your worries or bring him back, but it’s something, alright?”

At this, Percy accepts the bar, fumbling for a moment to tear it open; the wrapper reads _Dairy Milk_ , something he’s never had before. It tastes sugar-sweet, but it’s nice, and he finds himself several squares deep before he’s aware of what’s happening. Sirius grins.

“What’d I say?”

Percy smiles, and it’s the closest Sirius has ever seen to one that’s real.

He steals a piece, just because he can’t help it, and Percy rests his head on Sirius’s shoulder in the moments in which he starts to cry again, feeling the rise and fall of Sirius’s breath, comfortably irregular. “Will this feeling ever go away?”

“No,” Sirius says, wordlessly _scourgify_ ing Percy’s half-muddy brogues, wet with summer showers. “Because people never do.”

* * *

Percy and Charlie make near-daily walks through the forests behind their house, and, despite Percy always returning with scuffed knees and torn trousers, he makes no characteristic complaints on the state of them, simply fixing them up with magic each night until Sirius offers him a pair of jeans for the job. They’re a tad on the large side, because Percy is thin and tired-looking, but Sirius is used to taking things in with housekeeping spells and sorts him out.

“Haven’t you seen all of the forest by now?” he asks, pinching in the waist. Percy shifts.

“It doesn’t matter,” he says. “I like it. I like - the way that it’s quiet out there, and that you can forget what goes on at home and forget that there’s ever been something outside of the forest.” He sighs. “And I missed Charlie.”

“You mind if I come with you?” Sirius asks, trying to retain his laughter at how odd it looks: Percy, the style connoisseur, wearing black jeans stabbed with multicoloured pins and still adorned with loose thread from when they had been decorated with patches.

“No. I’d like it,” he says.

They don’t do much exciting hiking, tracing well-worn paths with bent-back trees, but Percy isn’t wrong: it’s like being somewhere else, in a world separate from the rest, and there’s a wonderful bliss to it. The only noise is the crunch of their footfalls, the shift of the tree branches in the wind, the birds singing sweetly back and forth.

Sirius has never been one for nature or quiet or reflectiveness, but suddenly he finds himself quite okay with it. He feels better almost automatically, and even Percy seems to have allowed a gentle sprinkling of his personality back through, lightly snipping at Charlie for having apparently poorly packed their sandwiches in the way that brothers do, with an easy chemistry.

“Here you go,” Percy says, passing Sirius his tuna sandwich. “We brought some mini rolls, but you can have those after.”

“What do you think I am, five?” Sirius scoffs. “I can eat my lunch in order.”

“I think you’re Sirius Black, and that you’ve been studiously avoiding eating your vegetables all week, so I thought that I ought to make sure you ate your main course this time,” Percy replies, letting through a well-meaning smirk that Sirius is surprised to find his heart flutters at. He’s not seen Percy like this, the whole time he’s been here, and it’s _nice_ : he’s still there, still human, still playful. “And, need I remind you, no chocolate roll for you until I see those sandwiches eaten.”

“I’m older than you,” Sirius points out stubbornly, but eats the whole sandwich anyway as Charlie snickers. “There’s no mayo in this.”

“Dragons don’t like mayonnaise,” Charlie responds immediately.

“He’s not a dragon,” Percy points out. “He’s a person - though, I’ll admit, the smoking does bring to mind dragons.”

Sirius is definitely more pleased when they bring out the chocolate mini rolls, sharing a small tray of them. He battles hands with Percy as they reach for one, more playful than he’s felt in a long time, and they compromise on sharing the last one, though Sirius takes a slightly too large bite of it and receives a withering look for it.

The world crashes back down when he takes his first steps back out of the forest, though when he looks back, Percy is still pushing through the branches, and when he looks up at Sirius, he glows.

* * *

“Hey. Hey, shh, I’ve got you.”

It takes Percy what feels like an eternity to realise where he is: that he’s in his bedroom, wrapped in his duvet, and not in the middle of Hogwarts as it crashes down  around him, that he’s not holding Fred’s dead body, that his dreams are just nightmares and Sirius Black is here, holding him, not screaming under a _crucio_ that never ends. Here, in this moment, he’s okay, and Sirius’s hands are warm around his shoulders, and Fred is dead, but that’s okay because he’s not really; Percy can hear him in George’s laugh, or Bill’s, or Charlie’s, or anyone’s.

“It was just a dream,” Sirius is saying, reassuring, and Percy nods, suddenly aware that he’s sweating and that his hair is plastered to his forehead and that he must look a state. “Do you want me to go get you some water?”

“I’ll come with you,” Percy mumbles, but he can’t stop himself from wrapping his arms around Sirius first, holding tight to his warmth, listening to the beat of his heart. He misses people. He feels like he doesn’t know anyone anymore, but this, this is so close that he feels like suddenly he’s not so alone, that maybe there’s someone he can know still.

Sirius pours him a cold glass of water, and fetches Percy another set of pajamas as he showers. He knows the nightmares. He knows the fear.

The colour has returned to Percy’s face when he steps back out. He looks somehow even smaller than usual, wearing thin cotton pajamas and with his curly hair flat with damp and combed back. There’s something peculiar about Percy, a wiseness, something about him that seems old, like a fifty-year-old man in a twenty-year-old’s body, but suddenly he looks like what he is: lost, a seventeen-year-old who didn’t know what to do with himself and is suddenly too many years older and equally as lost.

He falls asleep on the sofa with a cup of tea, and Sirius lets him be. If anyone deserves that sleep, he thinks it’s Percy.

* * *

Sirius has been living in Percy’s bedroom for a flash-forward four months when Percy tells him that he’s going to move out. With Oliver Wood, Puddlemere’s Keeper; Sirius is beginning to think that he’s having a surrealist’s dream, but when he pinches himself it hurts, and when he thinks of his room without Percy it hurts worse. He’s developed an everyday, and he’s about to lose it.

“I’m sorry,” Percy says. Sirius is not quite sure how to feel, or what to say. He’s never been good at this.

“Don’t be,” he replies. He could come up with a proceeding witty comment, but they somehow all die on his tongue, because four months have both sped by and been a lifetime, but regardless, he finds it bizarrely difficult to remember what life felt like without Percy Weasley and his half-ordered room and without the sound of his asthmatic snores and without the way Sirius can just _feel_ him in the room. It’s stupid. Sirius decides he’s thinking too hard, and yet - he can’t shake these thoughts, or these feelings.

Percy packs his bags two months later, once the finances have gone through and he’s found his place, a nice flat in a nice neighbourhood in a nice borough. He talks incessantly about it to his family, but never mentions it to Sirius.

He’s sorry he has to go, but he knows that he’s feeling too much. He can’t handle or hope to understand these feelings, and he wants instead to push them away.

But he tells Sirius how he feels now, a daily exchange born out of post-war worry that takes place cross-legged on Percy’s bed over cups of tea. Sirius has accidentally expanded a hole in a pair of jeans by tugging at it over these sessions; they couldn’t make eye contact while discussing their emotions if they wanted to. Percy can’t, in general.

“You can’t just say _feelings_ ,” Sirius says. “There are a lot of _feelings_ out there. Describe them.”

Percy’s mind stammers over the words and grasps for them, racks itself for simple adjectives in which to summarise the swelling in his chest. It finds words he doesn’t want - words he can’t understand, either.

“I want to be honest,” he says.

“Aren’t we always?”

“Not when it’s scary.”

“Are you scared of being honest right now?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“I’m scared of how you’re going to react.”

“Be honest with me.”

“I want to kiss you.”

Sirius’s breath audibly shudders. Percy looks up, but Sirius avoids his eyes. “I’m too old for you.” He knows it’s fucking bull, and Percy knows it’s fucking bull, and his heart is racing and he wants nothing more than to kiss Percy right back, bury his fists in Percy’s summer hair and push him into the mattress and never let go, because there’s nothing else left for him now but this.

So he does.

* * *

Percy moves out before Sirius wakes up.

* * *

Sirius moves out, too, eventually. He kicks dust around in Percy’s room, but everything in it is just a reminder of him, a reminder of his careful smile and that he used to sneak Ron’s chocolate pudding up to share for supper and the way he had looked on their last night together, as if, even if it was simply just for those moments, everything in him had _clicked_.

He doesn’t move back into Grimmauld Place; instead, he finds a cramped Diagon Alley flat above a dingy and loud pub and takes a job in a newly opening shop. He reads somewhere in the newspaper that Percy is dating Oliver.

He knows that this is good and right, that Percy is dating someone his age, someone that can make him happy. But he tears the page out and makes a paper aeroplane with it instead, and he wants to burn it but instead puts it in a drawer somewhere, one he doesn’t go into very often.

Life goes on.

* * *

Percy never forgets a date; he remembers, immaculately, when important events happened, and on precisely what day. He knows, therefore, when it’s been five years. He’s not with Oliver, anymore; he’s not even in London anymore, having left the country for a teaching job in Ilvermorny, Massachusetts. He spends his weekends wandering, with a picnic basket filled with tuna sandwiches and chocolate rolls that the students swear are intended for two people.

“Do you have a secret boyfriend, sir?” a mouthy third year Thunderbird asks him during a lesson. He taps his fingers against the solid oak of his desk.

“No,” he says. “I’m just waiting on someone.”

Five years. Percy thinks he’s waited long enough. He takes the week off school well in advance and organises work to be done in his absence that he knows will never be started, let alone completed, and cites a family meetup. He calls it a “bash”, to try and fit in, and the word feels strange on his English tongue; his students laugh, and he joins them. His laugh touches his eyes; in fact, it lights them up. He’s told to have fun.

On the five year anniversary, he knocks on Sirius’s door. He has a speech planned, because he’s Percy Weasley and he knows no other way, and it leaves his perfectly organised mind as Sirius looks at him, because he’s been waiting for this look for five years, craving it like nicotine.

“Can I be honest?” he asks. Sirius chokes on his answer, and instead nods, his eyes slowly welling. Percy has never seen him cry. “I can’t wait another second for this.”

Neither of them truly initiates the kiss, because they both do, without hesitation.

And they _belong_.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so much for reading! I wasn't sure about posting this, but I hope you enjoyed it. Please come yell at me on Tumblr if you liked it! @chrlieweasleys


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